Information Leakage Detection and Prevention (“ILDP”) is an emerging and fast-growing area in the field of information security. The business drivers to prevent information leakage have existed. However, due to the limitation of technological options in the past, organizations have been relying on measures with limited effectiveness. With information going digital and the growing prevalence of Internet access, the risk of sensitive corporate information/intellectual assets being leaked out poses a problem.
One common shortcoming of existing ILDP solutions is that they aim to protect every single valuable information, which leads to lengthy and laborious attempts to try to understand how every employee uses potentially sensitive information. Some ILDP solutions, especially those with client-side agents, require complex and time-consuming installation and configuration. Other conventional solutions require users to copy sensitive information to centralized locations, resulting in interruption to business users.
In addition, organizations generally do not know the data context and hence are not able to create the relevant rules. The general approach of the other ILDP solutions makes this problem worse by requiring the organizations to understand the data context fully.
Most ILDP solutions do not possess context awareness and implement policies in a one-sided manner—by looking at the sender or source—without identifying who the recipients are. This further exacerbates the perception that ILDP obstructs, more than provide benefits to, business.
In addition, there is no existing ILDP solution that is able to detect information that is already leaked out to the Internet sites. With the increased popularity of Web 2.0 applications, the speed of spreading of information has increased, which makes timely discovery of public domain leakages more important.
Another shortcoming of the existing ILDP solutions is that there is no segregation of access to collected information from an administrator. This means all sensitive information that is captured by the ILDP system will be made available to the administrators.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a new method and system which overcome at least one of the above-mentioned problems.